Mitt Romney Pushed State Health Care Law As Model For Obama In 2009 Article

Huffington Post | By Peter Finocchiaro
Posted: 03/03/12 02:20 PM ET | Updated: 03/03/12 02:44 PM ET

Health care reform has been perhaps the biggest policy obstacle to Mitt Romney's presidential hopes since Congress passed the national overhaul early in 2010.

Romney has done his best to quell comparisons between his signature piece of legislation as Massachusetts governor -- a health care reform plan intended to cover nearly every citizen of the Bay State -- and President Barack Obama's national reforms. The GOP candidate has insisted that what worked for Massachusetts was not appropriate for the nation as a whole.

In 2011, Romney said that, had he personally been consulted by White House officials, he would have told them just that:

[The president] does me the great favor of saying that I was the inspiration of his plan. If that's the case, why didn’t you call me? … Why didn't you ask what was wrong? Why didn't you ask if this was an experiment, what worked and what didn’t? … I would have told him, "What you’re doing, Mr. President, is going to bankrupt us."

However, Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed has unearthed a 2009 USA Today op-ed that could make such a line of defense more difficult for Romney going forward.

(More here.)